4 ms·
There was a hacked driver you could get that would tighten up the tolerances of the stepper motor and get from 1.5 to 1.9 MB of data onto a single floppy, but s
by hinkley 9mo ago
There was a hacked driver you could get that would tighten up the tolerances of the stepper motor and get from 1.5 to 1.9 MB of data onto a single floppy, but sliding the tracks closer together.
There was I believe at some point a game that shipped 1.5MB disks as a copy protection mechanism. But if you had this tool you could copy them anyway.
- userbinator 9mo agoAre you referring to 2M/2MGUI? That didn't change the track spacing (which is fixed) but used bigger sector sizes (similar to how HDDs went from 512B to 4K physical sectors): https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how-does-2m-for-dos-2-mb-formatted-floppy-disks-achieve-what-it-does https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how... (Big fuckings to Wikipedia for erasing history, and kudos to archive.org for preserving it: https://web.archive.org/web/20241203124243/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_%28DOS%29 https://web.archive.org/web/20241203124243/https://en.wikipe... )
- hinkley 9mo agoNo they definitely did more tracks, but it seems to be a smaller multiplier than I recalled. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/what-other-tricks-were-there-to-get-more-data-onto-floppy-disks https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/wha... 2-5% more tracks, 12.5% more sectors.
- userbinator 9mo agoThe track spacing didn't change, but yes, many if not all floppy drives could step the head slightly past the officially supported number of tracks.